Sit, Nipper, Sit… good dog!

They bathed him in bright red light one evening in 2006, as part of a promotion for the American Heart Association.

He still has a beacon in his left ear, in case an airplane flies too close.

From his perch, he has had a clear view of not one, but two different flea markets.

HDR shot of Nipper. Photo by Chuck Miller.

And since the day he was erected in 1954 on top of what is now the Arnoff Moving and Storage building on Broadway, the RCA Victor dog – the “Nipper” statue – has been the most recognizable landmark in North Albany, and outside of the Empire State Plaza or the Capitol building, the most recognizable and beloved icon of the Capital District.

And now, since I was asked by my good friend and trivia opponent Dan Smith of Tres Hombres to blog about the iconic doggie, I thought maybe a short history of the trademark icon and why it landed on top of a building in Albany’s early industrial warehouse district is in order.

There really was a fir-and-blood “Nipper,” a fox terrier/bull terrier mix, who was born in Bristol, England in 1884. When the dog’s original master died, the puppy became the pet of two French painters, Marc and Francis Barraud. In 1895, while Francis Barraud was sketching some customers in his studio, he saw Nipper gazing at a nearby gramophone, sitting absolutely still as he listened to the recorded voices. Perhaps Nipper thought he heard his old master talking from the horn, perhaps he was just fascinated with the newfangled music machine. But Barraud saw inspiration. While Nipper sat posed and still, Francis Barraud painted his dog as a still life, calling it “His Master’s Voice.”

Barraud took his painting to a music office in London, the Gramophone Co., Ltd. He offered the painting to the president of the comapny, Mr. William Barry Owen. Owen was interested in purchasing the artwork – but only if the cylinder gramophone could be replaced with one of their own disc-playing models. With that, Nipper’s picture was retouched, and Owen purchased the painting a week later.

In 1900, Emile Berliner – the inventor of the disc gramophone – visited the Gramophone Co.’s offices in London, and saw the painting. He was so moved by the artwork and the image that, upon his return to the United States, he registered the image as “Nipper And The Gramophone” for advertising purposes. On May 26, 1900, Nipper became an official trademark.

Berliner’s company later evolved into the Victor Talking Machine Company, and the dog and gramophone trademark appeared in their advertising campaigns, on the phonograph cabinets and lids, and even on the records themselves. The trademark was copied and plagiarized by other record companies; sometimes the gramophone-fixated party was a bird, or a cat, or even another breed of dog. Nipper even appeared in a Warner Bros. cartoon short – in “Daffy Doodles”, Daffy Duck, as a moustache-happy graffiti artist, paints a big handlebar moustache on a Nipper poster.

There is actually a major collector’s market for RCA Victor collectibles, or “Nipperiana” or “Nipperie” as the colloquial collector is called. You could purchase everything from Nipper salt and pepper shakers, Nipper jigsaw puzzles, Nipper marbles, Nipper coffee cups, Nipper record holders, Nipper statuettes of porcelain or plaster. True story. Around Christmas time in I would say 1989, I was perusing one of the secondhand shops on Central Avenue when I saw what looked like a Nipper statue. Unfortunately, the store owner selling the statue thought it would sell better if he painted a big black circle around one of Nipper’s eyes, and sell the statue as a Spuds MacKenzie statue. Yeesh.

In the 1950’s, enormous statues of Nipper and his gramophone – some as large as 25 feet tall, weighing almost four tons – were placed on top of RCA warehouses throughout the Northeast. Some of them still exist today – the Dover Museum in England has an honor guard of six-foot high Nippers; a quartet of 14-foot high stained glass Nippers can be seen at the former RCA Victor pressing plant in Camden, New Jersey.

Some of the Nipper statues almost didn’t survive to this day. Baltimore pawned off their 14-foot high Nipper (the only one that still had an accompanying gramophone) in 1977 to a Virginia collector for $1. Twenty years later, some backers raised $25,000 to repurchase the statue and bring it back to the city.

The largest Nipper, 24 feet tall and four tons of steel and composite, was built in 1954 and installed on top of what was then the RTA warehouse, an RCA Victor electronics distributor. The warehouse ownership eventually ditched RCA products for other manufacturers, such as Sanyo and Whirlpool, but the dog remained on top fo the building. Eventually the building itself went through different ownerships and incarnations – furniture store, flea market, art gallery. Eventually the composite statue of Nipper received an aircraft beacon as an earring, lest a low-flying plane accidentally crash into the statue.

In 1997, there was talk that Nipper might have to be removed from the top of the building, as 40 years of sitting on a roof obviously took their toll on the pooch. But Michael Arnoff, owner of Arnoff Moving and Storage, announced that Nipper would stay on top of the building, and that his company budgeted $1 million in building renovation, including repairing Nipper’s steel skeleton and a new paint job to his composite coat. Total cost to taxpayers – nothing; Arnoff’s company covered all the costs.

Today, the dog is as much a part of Albany’s skyline as the Corning Tower, the Egg, the steeple of St. Joseph’s Church, the RiverView Center, and the D&H / UAlbany administrative building. One pro-Albany website even refers to our fair city as “Nippertown.”

And whenever I want to test out a new camera lens, I drive down to the Broadway / Tivoli Street area, climb up on that inclined ledge behind Terry Haggarty Tire, aim at the big white dog, and shoot.

I love Nipper. When I was a little girl, I’d beg to go for a drive up Broadway after Mass at St. Mary’s in downtown Albany JUST to see Nipper up on the roof. I also remember a small appliance store on Central Avenue had plush Nippers as a freebie if you bought an RCA product. We didn’t need any RCA items, but the store sold us one of the Nippers on its own. I still have him…just need to repair his nose.

Nipper is such a great icon for the city of Albany! He was also bathed in red on National Wear Red Day in February 2008 – a day when everyone wears red to support the American Heart Association’s fight against heart disease in women. It’s great to see Nipper leading the charge in this important battle.